If you’re shopping for a pair of noise-cancelling true wireless earphones, the $149.99 LG Tone Free FN7 are certainly appealing from a value perspective, coming in at $100 less than Apple’s ubiquitous AirPods Pro. And for the price, they deliver surprisingly strong ANC (active noise cancellation), at times doing as well or better than more expensive models. This actually serves to highlight their shortcomings, as it’s possible to have the earpieces feel securely in place without having a good in-ear seal, throwing off ANC and audio performance. In addition, the on-ear controls are easy to misfire, and default audio settings are bizarrely sculpted. The good news is that in-app EQ can override the audio presets, and the drivers are capable of some excellent audio if you put in the work. For $20 less, however, Anker’s Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro earphones are much easier to use right out of the box.
Finding the Right Fit
The Tone Free FN7 earphones are available in black, with stem-style earpieces that have a glossy finish. The earpieces ship with three pairs of eartips in small, medium, and large sizes—the fit is relatively secure, but it’s possible for the earpieces to feel in place without a perfect seal. This can be bad for audio performance and ANC, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
Other than the fact that the audio experience is designed by Meridian, no concrete stats are given regarding the drivers or the frequency range. The earphones are compatible with Bluetooth 5.0 and supports AAC and SBC Bluetooth codecs, but not AptX.
Like much of the true wireless competition that isn’t specifically intended for exercise, the Tone Free earpieces have an IPX4 rating, meaning they can handle light splashes, some exposure to rain and sweat, and can withstand being wiped down with a damp cloth. They should never be soaked or rinsed under a faucet, however.
The earpieces have touch-sensitive surfaces, and are really easy to misfire—or to press and have nothing happen at all. There’s a tiny target, like a raised button, on each earpiece, and pressing it doesn’t give you the tactile feedback of a button being pressed. When you actively think about it, it works‚ but when you absentmindedly tap the outside of the earpiece like you would for most touch-sensitive controls, it can be frustrating. Playback is controlled with a single tap, volume is adjusted with a double tap, and three taps skips forward a track, but there’s no track backward. You can adjust the controls in the app, but as is, they’re a little less intuitive and easy to use than we’d like.
The charging case is one of the more compact we’ve seen, and unique in its circular shape. It has a flip-top lid that reveals the charging docks for the earpieces. The front area, below the lid, houses a status LED, and the back has a USB-C port for the included USB-C-to-USB-A cable. The cable, by the way, is conveniently long, unlike many charging cables that come with in-ears. The case also works wirelessly with Qi-certified chargers.
LG’s Tone Free app for Android and iOS is essential, if for no other reason than it provides crucial firmware updates for the earphones. Beyond that, the app has EQ preset modes—Immersive (a spatial effect we recommend avoiding if you want to hear an accurate representation of the mix), Bass Boost, Treble Boost, and Natural. Thankfully, there are two customizable presets as well, with eight adjustable bands, which we’ll get into in the next section.
Battery life is estimated to be roughly five hours with ANC on or seven hours with it off, and the charging case holds roughly 21 or 15 hours in those two scenarios. These numbers are pretty average, but your results will also vary with your volume levels.
Good Audio Performance—Once You Tune It
The Tone Free FN7 earphones deliver solid noise cancellation for the price, dialing back low-frequency rumble like you might hear on a plane or train quite well. The $280 Bose QuietComfort Earbuds do a more through job of blocking out these deep low frequencies, but compared with the $250 AirPods Pro, the results are surprisingly comparable.
On mids and highs, like you might hear at a busy cafe, LG’s earphones block out less of the mids than the AirPods Pro do, but the AirPods also seem to let through a thin film of high frequencies that the Tone Free more effectively block out. They also compare quite well with the Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro in these types of settings.
As mentioned, it’s possible to place the earphones in a way that feels secure and comfortable, but that doesn’t create a perfect seal. This will negatively impact ANC performance, and make a clear difference in audio performance when ANC is enabled. So if the ANC sounds less effective, try adjusting the earpieces slightly by twisting them a bit.
We don’t usually go into serious detail about an app’s EQ settings, but it seems necessary here, as the default listening mode, as well as the other three presets, deliver bizarrely sculpted sound signatures that really don’t do music much favors. With tweaking, however, the drivers here are capable of excellent audio. Starting with one of the custom EQ presets, we recommend increasing the high-mids and highs to add some crispness. If you want to boost the bass, that can be done gracefully here, too.
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On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the earphones sound truly bad using any of the Meridian presets—they are clearly doing something bizarre to the audio beyond simple EQ tweaks. But in custom mode, without making any chagnes, the audio sounds dulled. Thus, describing the sound signature accurately and usefully here is a bit of a conundrum. We’ll say that the drivers are capable of serious bass thunder on tracks like this, but depending on the mode you select, that bass-heavy delivery can be dialed back significantly.
We could go on as we typically do for our audio tests, but the results have so many X factors to them, we’ll say this: In Custom mode, with the high-mids, highs, and lows all boosted slightly and to different degrees, you get a totally acceptable, bass-forward, crisp sound signature. On Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, the drums sound full and round in this EQ setting, and the vocals have a nice baritone richness to them complemented by crisp detail in the high-mids. On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop can receive enough high-mid presence to retain its attack when in this EQ setting, and the sub-bass synth hits still come through. Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, can also sound relatively natural and bright in this setting.
The dual-mic array offers average intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone, we could understand every word we recorded, but there was some typical Bluetooth distortion making the words less clear than they could have been. The signal is relatively strong, but the mics can sound far away from the person speaking. On calls with a clear mobile signal, callers should have no issue understanding you despite this.
A Little Too Much Work
With easier-to-use controls and better audio performance out of the box, LG’s Tone Free FN7 earphones would likely go toe to toe with the Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro. But annoying controls can be a deal breaker for some, and you shouldn’t have to use an app to disable bizarre audio settings for things to sound normal. All this said, the earphones deliver surprisingly effective noise cancellation for the price, for a lot less than you’ll pay for our top picks from Apple and Bose. But Anker’s slightly more affordable $130 Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro earphones are ready to go out of the box, and earn our Editors’ Choice for affordable wire-free noise cancellation.
